A glance at Circle's 15 investment projects this year: leaning toward DeFi and infrastructure

Original author: MooMs, encryption researcher

Original compilation: Leo, BlockBeats

Circle, the issuer of USDC, is one of the largest companies in the encryption industry. According to CoinGecko data, the current market value of USDC is about 28.4 billion US dollars, and its investment department, Circle Ventures, currently holds a large amount of funds available for investment. The encryption researcher MooMs wrote About the "Circle 2023 Invested Projects" article.

Circle, valued at $9 billion, is one of the largest companies in the crypto industry. Below is the full list of Circle Ventures investments from 2023 to the present:

Alkimiya

Alkimiya is a decentralized protocol dedicated to block consensus capital markets, which enables consensus producers (PoW miners, stake validators) to create contracts backed by underlying "consensus resources" (such as hash power).

Financing amount: more than 7.2 million US dollars, investors also include Dragonfly and so on.

Hourglass

Hourglass is a time-bound token marketplace. Through TBT (Time-Bound Token), the market will allow users to obtain the liquidity of their locked assets by selling their time-bound rights in the secondary market, enabling users to find promised liquidity through long-term consistency and agreement rewards .

Financing amount: US$4.2 million, investors also include Eletric Capital and others.

LI.FI Protocol

LiFi Protocol is a cross-bridge and DEX aggregator, LiFi can cross any asset on any chain to the desired asset on the chosen chain, thus providing a superior user experience.

Funding amount: US$23 million, investors also include 6MV, Coinbase Ventures, etc.

DFlow

DFlow is a decentralized order flow marketplace powered by the DFlow Protocol's Payment for Order Flow (PFOF) model, designed to support order flow from various L1 chains and Rollups. Brokerage firms create, manage, monitor and analyze order flow auctions on the one hand, while market makers on the other hand submit bids to the auction, and the winner of the auction gets the exclusive right to execute the related order.

Funding amount: US$7.5 million (a total of US$7.5 million in two rounds of financing, Circle Ventures participated in a US$5.5 million round of financing), investors also include The Spartan Group, Multicoin Capital, etc.

Affine DeFi

Affine is an investment platform that allows users to purchase a basket of assets (rebalancing the vault) to invest in multiple strategies simultaneously.

Financing amount: US$6.9 million, investors also include The Spartan Group, Jump Crypto, etc.

Term Labs

Term is a scalable, fixed-rate DeFi liquidity solution, featuring a fair and transparent single-market liquidation rate that participants can determine through weekly auctions.

Funding amount: $2.5 million, investors also include Robot Ventures, Eletric Capital, etc.

Catalyst

Catalyst is an open-source protocol that also acts as a permissionless liquidity layer for the future of modular blockchains. With Catalyst, any new modular chain can automatically connect liquidity and swap with any chain — including liquidity hubs like Ethereum and Cosmos. Realize seamless liquidity connection and asset exchange between blockchains.

Funding amount: $4.2 million, investors also include Robot Ventures, The Spartan Group, etc.

Architect

Architect is an infrastructure solution that provides traders with low-latency trading, designed for institutional and large traders looking for safe, robust, customizable trading tools.

Funding amount: US$5 million, investors also include Coinbase Ventures, etc.

They are Finance

Huma Finance is a DeFi project that allows users to borrow against future income streams without collateral. Likewise, users can also contribute to liquidity pools, earning rewards from idle funds while supporting the community.

Financing amount: US$8.3 million, investors also include ParaFi Capital, etc.

OpenTrade

OpenTrade provides the Web3 financial management space with access to on-chain structured financial products backed by investing in Real World Assets (RWA), accessing short-term, RWA investments through a global network of financial institutions, asset managers and b2b networks, and Build it into an on-chain financial product that generates revenue.

Funding amount: US$1.5 million, investors also include Polygon Labs, etc.

Fractal

Fractal allows all on-chain assets — from cryptocurrencies to real-world assets — to interact and collateralize through universal margin accounts.

Financing amount: US$6 million, investors also include The Spartan Group, etc.

In addition to introducing Circle's recent DeFi investments, I also list their recent investments related to blockchain services and infrastructure, as follows:

**TipLink:**TipLink is a lightweight wallet designed to make transferring digital assets as easy as sending a link. Anyone with cryptocurrency can create a TipLink and send that link to anyone via any platform (text, discord, email, etc.). Once users connect their wallets to TipLink, they can deposit funds and then transfer ownership through a shared link. Each transaction also creates a new wallet, so the recipient doesn't need to download a new browser extension or app to spend the money. And, if the recipient does not claim the funds, the sender can still recover the funds.

**zkME: **ZkMe, a zero-knowledge identity oracle provider, zkMe allows users to encrypt their data and prove it on their own devices using ZKP to effectively authenticate users while protecting their privacy.

Msafe: is the first and only multi-signature, non-custodial digital asset management solution on Aptos so far.

**Rarimo:**Rarimo is a multi-chain protocol designed to solve the problems of liquidity, access and interoperability between non-fungible and fungible use cases. Rarimo makes it easier to work across different chains, allowing users to perform operations such as transferring tokens, pledging tokens, and providing proof of ownership across chains. The Rarify Labs behind it serve Rarimo's service providers and community members.

Among them, TipLink is one of my favorite creative projects.

Finally, in 2023, Circle is also one of the investors participating in the $120 million Series B financing of LayerZero Labs. LayerZero is also a full-chain interoperability protocol that everyone is very optimistic about. I hope that the future of L0 will be bright.